[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

[natasha at natasha.cc]

   Quoting Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:

> On 20 October 2011 07:21, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>> Joseph Bloch wrote:
>>>
>>> An interesting article by Ron Bailey over at Reason, concerning his
>>> debate with Peter Lawler last week:
>>>
>>> http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/18/transhumanism-vs-bioconservati[1]
>>
>> Similar themes came up in my debate yesterday evening at the Manchester
>> University student union, where I was debating David king from Human
>> Genetics Alert. He argued (from a pretty leftist standpoint) that
>> enhancement embodies the ideal of capitalism and since capitalism is bad
> for
>> human value and diversity hence most enhancement is bad.

   This is illogical.  Human enhancement is not based in capitalism  
and leftist means different things in different countries, not to  
mention that leftism in and of itself is contradictory.

   >>As he saw it,
>> western liberal individualism promotes uniformization in respect to the
>> market.

   Frankly, I tire of western liberal individualism because it lacks  
individuation and postures to know what is best for everyone. That  
type of universalism is doomed from the get-go because its rhetoric is  
not based on insights into how people can obtain well-being for  
themselves, their families and their geographical locations.

> This is a quite interesting issue which I discussed at some length in the
> interview recently made available online in English at
> http://www.biopolitcs.com[2].
>
> The very idea that there would be social pressure, and actually a rush,
> towards the adoption of safe, unexpensive, painless enhancing, eugenic and
> life-extending technologies, and that laws increasingly difficult to enforce
> would have to be enacted not to make them "compulsory", but rather to
> prevent their spreading, is the best counter-argument in fact against the
> spectre of a overhumanist "totalitarism" with all the usual Hollywood,
> tear-inducing trappings.

   What?  This reads more like a salvo than an explanation of the  
idea. Please rephrase. Thanks.

> Intelligent anti-transhumanists, such as Jürgen Habermas, fully realise
> that, and seem ready to renounce values such as freedom, self-determination,
> involuntary-suffering avoidance and protection of human lives for the sake
>  of humanism.

   Yes, this sounds right.

   >This is of course a major tactical point, because I suppose
> that most of their constituencies and audiences are not equally ready to do
> so. That is, except for our friend Charles Stross, who appears on the same
> line to consider a Vile Offspring that which becomes too detached from its
> human origins.

   This does not sound like a friend to me.  It sounds more like a SF  
writer who is causing hyperbole and fear to sell books.

> On the other hand, don't they really have a point, from an entirely
> different perspective?
>
> The idea that individual excellence is a capitalist value is of course
> stupid.

   Yes. Right.

> Individual (and, for that matter, collective) excellence has always been,
> and still is, equally a goal of anti-capitalistic systems such as, eg, the
> late Democratic Republic of Germany in its efforts to achieve top placements
> in olympic sports.

   I don't know about this.

> It is however true that globalised western capitalism might indeed involve a
> risk a loss of diversity across our species, given its ability to reduce,
> both socially and inter-culturally, the *plurality* of models of excellence
> and of value systems to a single normalised "Ken & Barbie" paradigm, where
> for instance a  disproportionate importance is attributed to one's ability
> to accumulate exchange units, that is money, or rather empty status symbols,
> in comparison with other possibly desirable features and optimality views.
>
> But, besides the fact that the process is already in place irrespective of
> any possible accelerating technology, genetic engineering and other similar
> tools allow a much greater uniformisation as well as a much greater
> *diversification* of the humankind than it has traditionally been the case.
> It is not the technology the problem, but what we choose to do with it.
>
> There again, Habermas does not miss the point, coming of course to value
> judgments opposite to mine, when he warns against what he regards as the
> ?nightmare scenario? of a ?genetic communitarianism?, in which different
> cultures could carry forward a ?genetic self-optimization of mankind in
> different directions, thereby ending up jeopardising the unity of human
> nature as a basis with respect to which all men have until now been able to
> understand and mutually recognise each other as members of the same moral
> community? (*The Future of Human Nature*, Polity Press 2003).

   Perhaps Habermas has read too much SF and horror stories.  This  
opinion lacks critical analysis. 

   What we need more than anything is to discuss the issues without  
having to resort to the singularity, existential risk, doomsday  
arguments, simulation scenarios, etc. and just discuss the future as a  
matter of fact, look ardently at the issues, the discourse, the  
dialectics, and form some opinions that are balanced and insightful.  
That is what transhumanism needs.

   Again, that is what transhumanism needs.

   Natasha



Links:
------
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/18/transhumanism-vs-bioconservati
[2] http://www.biopolitcs.com/


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